HELTER SKELTER is a splacist art work from 1999 where I faxed Charnwood Borough Council’s Director of Planning and Technical Services, Jonathan Hale, a proposal to form a Helter Skelter for peace around Loughborough’s famous Carillon Tower war Memorial.

The intervention was based around the fact that all planning proposals have to be responded to by the council. The piece generated several press reports and a number of responses from the public. Contrary to Jonathan Hale’s view that the public might find it controversial and be against it many were broadly in favour of it, at least as an idea. The official Carillon player, who fisted out songs from the shows and such on the Carillon keyboard in among the bells at the top of the tower, told Loughborough Echo that it was a fun idea, the bells playing as Loughbohemians slid down the helter skelter in the name of peace and in memory of those who died in the First World War.

I’m now revisiting engagement with Loughborough’s Carillon Tower, an amazing building and now on all the signs heralding entry to Loughborough by road. Watch this splace!

Extract from The Splacist Manifesto:

We will own this city.
We will take it back.
We will link and shift; across time, space, people, places and processes
We will weave throughout the fabric of people’s lives.
We will unpick it.

We will affect and be affected.
We will glory in the moment, the collage, the marking and then passing on.

Splacism is a contemporary mode of practice proposed by Paul Conneally. A new set of ideologies defined by Hannah Nicklin and Nikki Pugh. A hop, skip and a jump away from phsychogeography and the works of the situationist international. Think space, place and splice. Developed empirically by whoever’s interested.